by Erin Halfelven

2.8 Interlude with Joocers

 
"Did you get the jooce?" Patty Gomez asked, pushing her curly black hair behind her ears after she opened the door. She looked surprised to see her roommate in the middle of the afternoon.

"Sure I got it? Whadja think?" Leon Pasco tried to look cool, like someone who had just made a major drug score. He eeled his way past the girl into the room they rented together from his step-sister. It had once been a one-car garage, sitting by itself on the alley behind Rhonda's aging bungalow in south Santa Ana. Now furnished with a cast-off sofa bed, an ancient analog TV, a couple of kitchen chairs and a dinette table it barely made it out of the dump category. Suburban hovel would make a good description.

Patty had been sitting in the dark again, shades pulled, lights off. The little brunette was not impressed with Leon's act. "How much did you get?" she demanded.

Jooce, also known as hype, was sold by the "mil," a unit derived from the scientific measurement, milliliter: one thousand to the liter, or about 950 to a quart. Five mils made a "street dose" or one hundred drops, using a standard pharmacy eye dropper. A single drop would be enough to get a noob high for hours, but frequent joocers needed more. Patty and Leon had been joocing for only a few weeks, since late January, and they could still cop a nice clean six-hour buzz from as little as four drops.

Leon held out his hand and Patty's eyes bugged out. The little two ounce bottle would hold 60 mils, 1200 drops, 300 hits at the current level of Patty's and Leon's addiction. Leon reached into a pocket of his windbreaker and pulled out two more little bottles. He couldn't stop grinning now.

"Holy shit," said Patty. "You didn't have anything like that kind of money." Street price for a mil was about $200. Leon had more than $30,000 worth of jooce in three little bottles, even if one of them was not quite full.

"Luck, mostly," Leon admitted. "I was coming up on Too Rivers with our cash, hoping I could talk him into taking a little less than the thousand he was asking for a file." A 'file' or 'phial' was five mils in a tiny plastic bottle, also called a 'spoon.'

"Uh, huh," said Patty, licking her lips. She turned suddenly and headed to the little kitchenette in the corner of the one room flat. Leon looked at the clock on the microwave; he knew Patty had a shift at the local McTalley's in less than two hours. They usually tried to eat something before she went to work; otherwise the smell of fast food cooking tended to nauseate her on an empty stomach.

"Do we want to eat before we drop?" she asked, echoing his thinking.

"Do you want to drop before your shift?" he returned.

"Please, one drop at least, that way I can get through the shift without wanting to go crazy. You were telling me how you ended up with three half-gills?"

"Oh yeah," said Leon. He resumed his story. "Too Rivers got busted before I got to him. I saw the whole thing. Cops came out of nowhere and they had a Blue Star with them." A Federal Office of Meta-Crime agent. "Not a trooper in power armor, just a foom in the white jacket with the blue stars on his shoulders."

"Huh," said Patty. "Is Too Rivers a meta? How about I make mac and cheese, then we can hype afterward. Buzz will last longer that way."

Leon didn't say anything for a moment. Patty stopped to look at him. He stared back then nodded, looking away. "Mac and cheese," he said.

 
Patty put the water on to boil, with a pinch of salt in it. She got the box of noodles and cheese sauce down from the cabinet, took out the milk and butter from the door of the little refrigerator, and got out a bunch of green onions to clean. Her mother had always said, "If you eat cheese or meat, always eat something green at the same meal." She tried to eat right, and make sure that Leon did, too, but with her jooce habit she got hungry at odd times and sometimes for odd things. She'd made a meal of bok choy fried in a little peanut oil once; at least it was green. Leon had been known to snack on Oreos dipped in Sriracha sauce.

 
He watched her work at the little kitchen cabinet, hardly three feet long between sink and refrigerator. He wished he'd been able to find steady work. The day labor market in Santa Ana was hard for an Italian-American of Jewish descent, even if he did look Mexican and speak the lingo after a fashion. Better than Patty did, honestly; she'd grown up in Portland, ferstarsake.

He wondered again if they could go into the business of selling jooce, now that they had more than they needed themselves for the near future.

Patty finished the story of how he had acquired the bottles by guessing. "So you saw where he ditched the stuff and kyped them after he got arrested?"

"Uh huh," said Leon. "He stuck them up inside one of those pooper-scooper bag dispensers on Broadway near the park."

Patty laughed and he grinned at her.

"The cops didn't look there so when they hauled his ass away; I just nipped out and fetched a bag from the roll and put the bottles in it." He held up the little black plastic bag with the smiling doggy on it to show her, and they both laughed again.

"Neat!" she said. She wiggled a bit to show her excitement and looked at him under her bangs. Maybe after they dropped…. He felt pretty sure of that, dropping seemed to do something to libidos.

He watched her measure milk and cut up butter. The cleaned green onions went on the table in a nest of paper towels. She drained the noodles, added the milk and butter and the packet of powdered cheese. Some black and red pepper, too. His mouth watered, it might be simple and cheap but mac and cheese was one of his favorite meals and had been for almost his whole life.

They sat down to eat; glasses of cold water flavored with a slice of tangerine to drink. It tasted good, and they ate it all, crunching on the green onions. They shared a bag of apple slices that Patty had stolen from McTalleys for dessert.

They looked at one another. Patty got up to get a slice of bread and a knife, and Leon took out the already opened bottle of jooce and an eyedropper. She cut the bread into four squares, and he put two drops from the eyedropper on each little square. Patty put one corner into each of two baggies then they solemnly ate one bit of dropped bread apiece.

"Here's looking at you, Toots," said Leon, thinking he was quoting some old movie.

Patty smiled, her mouth closed. He knew she liked to let the bread melt on her tongue and feel the tingle in her mouth as the jooce began to work.

It would take less than two minutes to reach full effect, and they would have the other piece of dropped bread to take later to extend the buzz. If they didn't wait too long; jooce lost potency if too much air got to it before you took your drop. It had to be kept liquid, or it went off quickly and bad jooce gave you symptoms a lot like the flu.

Leon was wondering vaguely if he should get the key and go up to the front house to use the bathroom when Patty suddenly giggled. He looked at her, feeling a grin spread across his own face.

"Why is he called 'Too Rivers'?" she asked suddenly. "And I know it's t-o-o, not t-w-o."

Leon shrugged. "He used to be a DJ, they called him 'Too Much' then; it got shortened to just 'Too'."

"A rapper?" she said. "Hoodathunkit?" She laughed out loud, rubbing her arms. "Goosebumps," she said, pleased.

"You always get those. Me, I just get a raging hard-on." He raised an eyebrow.

She nodded, smiling. "Let's take the key and go up to Rhonda's and do it on the big bed." She stood and held her hand out to his as he got to his feet, too. "Besides," she added, "I need to pee first."

Afterwards, they lay across the bed in the front house master bedroom. Rhonda wouldn't be home for hours, and Patty didn't have to leave for work for almost forty minutes. For modesty, Leon had pulled the sheet back up over them. He had funny ideas like that, thought Patty, and she loved him for them.

"It's always good but it's better with the jooce," she murmured into his shoulder.

Leon snorted. "For guys, it's always good says it all."

She giggled. She wanted to lie there and enjoy the good feeling. Everything always seemed more real, and at the same time, more fantastical on jooce. Even the cobwebs in the upper corners of the room glistened with magic in the afternoon light dimmed by coming through the curtains.

"Too Rivers isn't a meta," said Leon suddenly, as if the earlier conversation were still fresh in his mind.

"No, huh?" said Patty. "Then why was a Blue Star involved in arresting him? They only get involved in meta-crime." Under the sheet, she dragged the nails of one foot lightly up his leg.

"It's the hype. The jooce," he said. "You know the legend? Why five mils is called a 'dose'?"

"Huh. Yeah, taking that much at once, a hunnert drops, is supposed to be enough to make you go meta. But so's getting hit by lightning or freezing to death or anything else that nearly kills you."

"I think it's true," said Leon. "I think that's part of why Blue Stars sometimes get involved in arresting jooce dealers. And the other part…."

Patty hiked herself up further onto the pillow, wrapping her arms around Leon's head and neck and putting her lips, and teeth, against the soft skin of his neck.

"Uh."

"What other part?" she asked between nibbles. It always amazed her how she could think of one thing and do something entirely different with equal concentration when dropping.

"The other part," Leon gasped. "They just found out…jooce is made from metas."